Static Main Menu

Discourses: Splendid Work by Machiavelli

Article shared by :

ADVERTISEMENTS:

Discourses: Splendid Work by Machiavelli!

Machiavelli’s assumptions about human nature and behaviour lead him to conclude that, though power is most easily studied in the case of the new prince, a republic is a healthier and more successful form of government than a monarchy. This is the theme of The Discourses: a quite different work from The Prince, but resting on the same presuppositions.

In a monarchy, one man has supreme power. One man is in a position to stifle—and, if he is to survive, must stifle—the manly impulses of all those subject to him. In a republic, every individual is a prince: every individual is able to develop and deploy his own virtu defense of his security, freedom and property, thereby producing a kind of collective or public virtu that conduces to the welfare and safety of all.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

In a monarchy, Machiavelli says, only one man is free; in a republic, all are free. This collective virtu does not arise out of friendship or altruism. Men co-operate because they know that collective wisdom and effort is, on the whole, better than that of any individual. Each man co-operates with others so far as is necessary to secure his own good, while at the same time competing with others for the things that men value—glory, honour and riches.

A republic furnishes everyone with both the benefits of co-operation and the opportunity to develop virtu by striving with others to assert himself in an open forum. Republics will be more stable than monarchies, more able to defend themselves and more successful at extending their territories by war, not because they somehow submerge or counteract human self-assertiveness, but because they give it freer range and so produce sturdy, indomitable and self-reliant individuals.

The problem faced by a republic is that it might become a tyranny which should be avoided. Republics can only be stable if they enable men to compete with one another creatively without allowing anyone to acquire so much power that he can simply dominate everyone else. There is bound to be conflict between the aristocracy or commercial elites and the mass of the people.

The former will wish to dominate the latter; the latter will wish to remain free. Such conflict is inevitable and energizing. The struggle between the plebeians and the Senate in the Roman republic is the example to which Machiavelli looks. Opposing interests produce the force by which good laws are generated, provided such conflict is kept in bounds by properly designed political institutions.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

Machiavelli realizes that actual governmental forms will vary according to the circumstances of the people in question, but the best form of state, he thinks, will be a republic with a mixed constitution rather like that favored by Aristotle. Where the people have a meaningful share in the government, all are able to feel secure in their honour, property and person.

The laws must be clear and made known: the citizens must know with a high degree of certainty what they can and cannot do with impunity. General economic prosperity should be encouraged, but excessive individual wealth and luxury prevented by the laws. Due recognition must be given to the merits of citizens, and advancement in the service of the state should be open to those who seek honour and glory. There should be a state religion for the inculcation and maintenance of civic virtue.

This religion should not, however, be Christianity, which encourages weakness and submission. There should be a citizen army, both to defend the republic and to extend its possessions by wars of aggression. The army should serve an educational as well as a military purpose: it should instill in citizens a respect for authority, patriotism and martial virtues. It will also provide the means for individual ambition to find its natural and healthy expression.

Life in a republic should not be too comfortable. Social cohesion and vigour are most readily secured in conditions of hardship and crisis. Such conditions bring out the best in the people and encourage them to work together.

Ease and security are inconsistent with public virtu not because they make people selfish, but because they turn their natural selfishness inwards and make it destructive. In short, Machiavelli regards political activity as being the activity of individuals with power of various kinds and degrees who are trying to keep what they have and acquire more.

The Prince and The Discourses are not radically different nor are they contradictory. Both share a view of human nature as individualistic, competitive and, where necessary, ruthless and unscrupulous. The Prince is an essay on how the prince is to control the forces of human nature to his own advantage.

The Discourses is a treatise on how these forces can be harnessed in such a way as to secure unity and public safety. But the forces involved in each case are the same. It is often said that Machiavelli is the first political theorist to give serious attention to the idea of raison d’ etat (French term for ‘reason of State’; the justification given when the political interests of a nation-state override any moral principles governing the state’s actions).

This may be so, but it is not the whole story. Machiavelli admires the combination of practical qualities that he calls virtu, even where no particular raison d’état is at stake. He does so because, at heart, he is fascinated not so much by outcomes as by the phenomenon of power itself. One cannot help forming the impression that, for Machiavelli, the ends to which power is applied are of secondary importance.

He admires Cesare Borgia—an individual who, by all ordinary standards, is a cruel and vicious tyrant—for his effectiveness and not his moral character. Unlike the great majority of his forebears and contemporaries, Machiavelli really does believe that politics is a morally neutral art. The fact that he, more than anyone, established this as a respectable view of how political events and relationships are to be analyzed is what gives his career its significance in the history of political thought.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

To sum up, Machiavelli was a man of great observation, acuteness and industry; noting with appreciative eye whatever passed before him, and with his supreme literary gift turning it to account in his enforced retirement from affairs.

He does not present himself, nor is he depicted by his contemporaries, as a type of that rare combination, the successful statesman and author, for he appears to have been only moderately prosperous in his several embassies and political employments.

In the conduct of his own affairs, he was timid and time-serving; he dared not appear by the side of Soderini, to whom he owed so much, for the fear of compromising himself; his connection with the Medici was open to suspicion, and Giulo appears to have recognized his real forte when he set him to write the history of Florence, rather than employ him in the state. And it is on the literary side of his character, and there alone, that we find no weakness and no failure.